Aesculapius

I enjoy listening to morning edition - usually through the app. I also contribute to NPR monthly. They have to stop the on air fundraising campaigns. It really drives listeners away. At least give those that already contribute an alternative feed.

Physician here.
Medicine is one of the few professions in which capital is tied to labor (at least of the licensed independent clinicians). Hospitals, clinics, etc., can’t run any test, provide any service, perform any surgery, without a physician (or other licenses clinicians) order.

Health systems rely on their physicians to drive clinical practice. Physicians are the experts after all. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, but at its core, it is a partnership. This partnership certainly has it’s ups and downs. But this is what happens when the health system forgets that it is a partnership.

Be sure to drink your ovaltine

Here is the correct quote from Winston Churchill: “If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.”
Also, conservatism in Churchill’s era is absolutely NOT what conservatism is now.

Most tests had their expiration dates extended.

Deep cut! I first heard of and saw that show in college. It’s great!

You are correct. But what Austin Powers was referencing was this scene from The Prisoner. Top notch 60’s TV!

In order to be worthwhile, rail needs to be faster and cheaper than a car. To do so, it would need to be fairly high speed as well. The capital expenditure for something like that would be enormous and the return on investment would take decades. Not to mention all the eminent domain issues. That type of project can only really be done via public dollars.

This is great!

Right now there is a serious issue with discharging patients from the hospital environment into skilled care. Since COVID, many nursing homes don’t take admissions over the weekend, limit admissions to long term care (as opposed to transitional care which is short term - and better reimbursed), and often have wait times. This has the effect of increasing the length of time a patient is in the hospital unnecessarily, thus decreasing hospital capacity.

Yes, the nursing homes have staffing issues, but they pay for shit. Many of them pay less than $20/hour. You need to goto school to get your CNA license which isn’t free. You can get many other jobs for better pay without the investment of education.

Source: I am a hospitalist physician. I work with nursing homes a great deal and my wife used to work at one as a CNA.

Physician here. The best marker we have of covid prevalence is wastewater testing. With the availability of home kits (and no reporting) and people refusing to test when symptomatic, the old markers of positivity rates and number of positive tests aren’t as valid. Even hospitalization numbers can fluctuate for multiple reasons. Municipal wastewater testing truly gives a sense of covid in a population.

There were many senior leaders on the flight: Prigozhin, Utkin (early founder, commander), Chekalov (economic & security leader), Makaryan, Propustin, Totmin, Matuseev (all various commanders). While this seems super dumb to have all these folks on the same flight at the same time, apparently they were. With this much senior leadership now suddenly gone, the Wagner group may be struggling to get their own house in order before they can take organizational action.

Do the police compare DNA to genealogy databases? The odds the person used one is low, but maybe a family member?

I agree. Fundamentally, these folks that support him now are not doing well. It’s not the same for everyone. Some are feeling disenfranchised from parts of daily life, some are experiencing undesired change, some are terribly unhappy and don’t know where to point their frustration, etc. Trump isn’t a likely cult leader. He isn’t very charismatic like we normally associate cult leaders. But he came with the right message at the right time and for a very large segment of our population, that message made sense to them. It gave them a REASON for how they were feeling, even if they didn’t understand their own feelings in the first place.

When the day comes that the spell is broken, society must be ready to re-engage with these people in a meaningful way. Otherwise we are doomed to repeat it with the next person to show up and given them another reason.

For those wondering about nuclear options, Wired did a nice write up recently.

Good! Providing a cheap service at the cost of the staff doing the work is not acceptable.

This is all just grandstanding anyway. They may leave, but likely they will just increase their rates.

Physician here. Masks absolutely reduce transmission and the chance of contracting COVID.

Here is the definitive study on the subject.

Here is a video of a presentation by one of the authors along with some demonstrations and explanations.

TLDR: Here is the Abstract:
There is ample evidence that masking and social distancing are effective in reducing severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission. However, due to the complexity of airborne disease transmission, it is difficult to quantify their effectiveness, especially in the case of one-to-one exposure. Here, we introduce the concept of an upper bound for one-to-one exposure to infectious human respiratory particles and apply it to SARS-CoV-2. To calculate exposure and infection risk, we use a comprehensive database on respiratory particle size distribution; exhalation flow physics; leakage from face masks of various types and fits measured on human subjects; consideration of ambient particle shrinkage due to evaporation; and rehydration, inhalability, and deposition in the susceptible airways. We find, for a typical SARS-CoV-2 viral load and infectious dose, that social distancing alone, even at 3.0 m between two speaking individuals, leads to an upper bound of 90% for risk of infection after a few minutes. If only the susceptible wears a face mask with infectious speaking at a distance of 1.5 m, the upper bound drops very significantly; that is, with a surgical mask, the upper bound reaches 90% after 30 min, and, with an FFP2 mask, it remains at about 20% even after 1 h. When both wear a surgical mask, while the infectious is speaking, the very conservative upper bound remains below 30% after 1 h, but, when both wear a well-fitting FFP2 mask, it is 0.4%. We conclude that wearing appropriate masks in the community provides excellent protection for others and oneself, and makes social distancing less important.

He may be doing this intentionally. He and his team may be looking for a judicial reaction in order to use it as grounds to move the trial to another location citing unfair bias.

Speeding up the trial would be a good move. The judge still needs to be careful so that she doesn’t give grounds for appeal. I vote for huge fines.

Interesting fact: Israel does not have a formal written constitution. Instead, they have a series of Basic Laws which is like rolling out a chapter at a time. Very interesting reading here.

Did someone throw the boy from the ferry?